I'm glad that I can always see the other end of the ethernet cable, and therefore do not need a way to determine if there is an active connection.

Or it's physically plugged in, but the driver stopped working with the last OS update and it never bothered to tell you, it's just been using wifi and you never noticed, because there wasn't any indicators.

The cable being plugged in tells you nothing about the state of the connection at the upper layers. Also, the icon doubles as a shortcut to connection status and settings panels.

Do you think it's clutter? Drag the icon to the overflow menu, you won't see it again unless looking for it. This is why I value customizability and use Windows.

My computer has USB-C ports, not Ethernet ports. ;)

I’m a sketchy dongle away from a client zoom call going poorly.